Richard Norton Smith Quotes

The larger the disaster, the more necessary it is to have the government as the principal driver of recovery.

This is the United States of America. It means we respond to our fellow Americans in times of crisis and emergency and disaster.

It's not that bad things never happen. But there's a pattern in which most people are calm, resourceful, altruistic, and they improvise emergency systems that work really well - whether it's getting the babies out of a collapsed hospital or putting together a community kitchen to feed everybody for the next few months.

Americans rightly asked, if this is the way our government responds to a natural disaster it knew about days in advance, how would it respond to a surprise terrorist attack? How would it respond to an earthquake?

The president's very right about one thing: When you have a disaster of that scale, whether it be natural or a terrorist attack, there's only one part of our entire government, state or local, that is equipped to handle it, and that's the U.S. military.

As everyone in Louisiana knows, there was often no communication or coordination between the state and federal government in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

If we had a terrorist attack, the way the people respond is going to determine whether that attack is just a tragedy or whether that attack becomes an all-out disaster.

In a world full of competing emergencies and disasters, it really helps if there is an international locomotive that can help us bring attention - help us bring resources.

There's nothing like a jolly good disaster to get people to start doing something.

Disasters impel a nation to rise

The nation’s disaster mechanisms do not seem to be in the hands of those who know how to use them.

As with most politicians, it took a disaster for them to do something.

There are disasters that happen - Hurricane Harvey came up, and you had people self-organizing through the community and getting in boats and driving around rescuing people coordinated ad hoc through this network. That's not a media function.

The people with the most resources are the federal government. If you can invade a country halfway across the world in a matter of days, you can surely come to the aid of your own citizens in a shorter order of time.

The bureaucracy needs to do more than one thing at a time. It’s appropriate to save people with helicopters, but it can’t be done to the exclusion of everything else.

After a disaster, processing claims quickly trumps everything.

Every day should be #GivingTuesday when it comes to surviving natural catastrophes and man-made disasters.

When there is a calamity, don't think about the party, think beyond the party.

In the '70s, you didn't know who was going to survive in a disaster film.

I want every health care professional, every first-responder, every citizen, every visitor to know that in Florida we continue to prepare for the worst. But we pray for the best.

When we have a disaster in Japan, I wonder, how can we prevent our lives and traditions and history from the disaster?

It's actually more than 700 case studies that show that, especially in times of crisis, we show our best selves. And we get this explosion of altruism and cooperation. This happens again and again after natural disasters, after earthquakes and after floodings.

I can sign all of the emergency proclamations I want, but that's not going to fix the infrastructure in urban Honolulu.

Since 1963, the University of Delaware's Disaster Research Center has conducted nearly 700 field studies on floods and earthquakes, and on-site research reveals the same results every time: the vast majority of people stay calm and help each other.

When you have the worst disaster in American history, you've got to be attuned to expectations,.